"This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances which demanded it."

To preface my review; I had high expectations before reading this. The size of the novel put me off for a long time but I had only heard raving reviews about not only Babel but R.F. Kuang as an author. While I had small gripes when it came to this novel none of it had to do with the plot or story itself. The actual story takes a long time to start but the setup is worth it in the end. It also feels repetitive and drawn out, mainly in the beginning, the once it really gets going Babel is hard to put down.

Heartbreaking, and raw whilst conveying the ugly truth about envy, ethics, culture and so much more. Babel is an amazing example of what dark academia is. As a genre dark academia should shed light on elitism, whiteness, misogyny, and wealth and yet that message tends to get lost in the writing of so many of the white authors who write dark academia. The message isn’t lost in Babel and is highlighted in a compelling, heart-wrenching, and complex story written by Kuang.

The story focuses on Robin, a foreign-born young man who is taken away from his home in Canton and is brought up in the early to mid-1800s to learn languages. Without giving too much away, Robin struggles with identity, moral obligation, and being a young man of color in a space that isn’t welcoming of people who aren’t white. Robin begins Babel as naive and throughout the story, we go on a journey (of about 4 years) with him as he grows, changes, and learns.

Robin is balanced out by the friends he makes once he joins Oxford and through the enriching and just as complex friends he has and the people that surround him it becomes clear (or should) that just because you’re a person of color that doesn’t mean you will face the same type of racism as someone that is a different race than you. Thankfully, the story isn’t surface-level and actually dives into the different types of racism and misogyny the characters face and how it impacts them, their decisions, and their friend group as a whole. 

It took me a long time to figure out where the story was going because the majority of it focuses on the now. I was so caught up with the relationships and their progress through Oxford that it wasn’t until the real action started to happen that I began to wonder what the ending would be. Usually, I can predict the ending with a well-written book but because every character is so multidimensional and feels so real I couldn’t even begin to guess. All I can really say is that the frustration I felt in the beginning with the slowness paid off for the end because it didn’t feel like the ending was plucked out of thin air. It made sense for the story and the characters.

“Robbery, butchery, and theft - they call these things empire, and where they create a desert, they call it peace.”